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Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

kivy.org

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Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#11
I had the chance to use Kivy to build a GUI for my Master's thesis. I was always on the irc channel and yes the community is small but I always got the help I needed from the creators as well. It's easy to use once you get the grasp of it. I used it as a proof of concept but was pretty happy with the result. That was 9 months ago so I'm not up to date with the latest release though.

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#12
post #7
post #5

I've been using Kivy for a few months now. From my experience it's a great language/platform to develop proof of concepts and prototypes. Main drawbacks: - Community size - It's missing some general styling capabilities Because everything is in Python, it's really easy to get started. Give it a go!

Have you visited their irc chan on freenode (#kivy)? The people who created Kivy are there and very responsive - I remember one of them answering me on the 25th of December. Granted the community is small but I found the people there very lovely to interact.

Unfortunately I have other experiences, mainly not getting any response at all on the irc chan.

Will try again though, I should probably also be more responsive myself to questions of others.

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#13
post #5

I've been using Kivy for a few months now. From my experience it's a great language/platform to develop proof of concepts and prototypes. Main drawbacks: - Community size - It's missing some general styling capabilities Because everything is in Python, it's really easy to get started. Give it a go!

Compared with Qt and Tk for Python, where you have to manually code layouts (unless you use some layout generation tools, but they're all pretty iffy), how easy is it to design and code a form/screen/input/etc in Kivy?

I'd say it's really easy to create a form layout using the kv-language (which is yaml based and hooks into Python classes)

If you want to use somethimg else than the default theme however, you might need to do some extra work. As someone else commented, there is a material design theme, haven't used that myself though.

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#14
post #5

I've been using Kivy for a few months now. From my experience it's a great language/platform to develop proof of concepts and prototypes. Main drawbacks: - Community size - It's missing some general styling capabilities Because everything is in Python, it's really easy to get started. Give it a go!

Compared with Qt and Tk for Python, where you have to manually code layouts (unless you use some layout generation tools, but they're all pretty iffy), how easy is it to design and code a form/screen/input/etc in Kivy?

[deleted]

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#15
post #12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you visited their irc chan on freenode (#kivy)? The people who created Kivy are there and very responsive - I remember one of them answering me on the 25th of December. Granted the community is small but I found the people there very lovely to interact.

Unfortunately I have other experiences, mainly not getting any response at all on the irc chan. Will try again though, I should probably also be more responsive myself to questions of others.

Might depend where you are based and when you go on IRC. I know that the Kivy team is based in Europe and tend to be online during working hours there. If you're based in the West coast for example you might log in only when they are all away - OK, if the community was a bigger that issue would be solved.

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#16
post #8

Can anyone comment on specifically how Kivy is better than the other options available (e.g., QT?). How have other peoples' experiences been? Some comments say small community, but that seems like it could be a large drawback honestly. Does that mean, for example, there are few(er) stack overflow posts about it, and you are likely to run into some painful issues along the way? How well does it integrate with matplotl…

We were building a interface for a multi-touch table (9 meter per 1.2m) , so basically a device on which you could look on a lot of different angle, for which most GUI framework are not suitable as they have a strong opinion on what is "top" and what is "bottom" , while kivy easily permitted us to have different widget rotated

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#17
post #9

I always keep my eye on the Play Store for any production apps using Kivy. It used to be the case that they all had a fairly unconventional (game-like) UI or a fairly clunky one. Can anyone point me to a Kivy app that shows - if not totally native looking - at least a fairly standard approach to developing an Android UI? (on the plus side - Kivy apps always seem smooth and responsive on Android) EDIT - I found this p…

I think it's still generally the case that Kivy apps tend to use the default (clunky) theme or something more custom, but there has recently been some user activity around alternatives, e.g. a set material design themed widgets ( https://github.com/kivymd/KivyMD ). I'm not sure if any apps using this have been published on the Play store. We've been discussing how to include more unified themeing capabilities in Kivy…

For those seeking screenshots, i have found https://kivymd.github.io/

This definitively looks interesting. I had previously tested kivy and only had little issues with pyjnius and font sizes as switching between versions. More modern looks sounds great, might the resurrect that old project.

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#18
Kivy's multiplatform support is impressive. An application I'm working on at the moment runs in X on Ubuntu, on Microsoft Windows and on a Raspberry Pi 3. On the latter Kivy draws the UI using the frame buffer directly, without X.

Kivy does have its quirks and oddities. From the top of my head:

- Want to set the background color on a widget? Gotta drop into GL-like drawcalls and add a coloured rectangle below your widget.

- On the Raspberry Pi, I see a strange behaviour where adding and removing elements from the widget hierarchy causes widgets to randomly not appear, or flicker, or old widgets to re-appear — even though the widget hierarchy looks "clean" on inspection. This problem doesn't occur on Linux using X, or on Windows, so I suspect the reason lies somewhere in the frame buffer inplementation.

Edit: Formatting

Re: Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

#19
post #18

Kivy's multiplatform support is impressive. An application I'm working on at the moment runs in X on Ubuntu, on Microsoft Windows and on a Raspberry Pi 3. On the latter Kivy draws the UI using the frame buffer directly, without X. Kivy does have its quirks and oddities. From the top of my head: - Want to set the background color on a widget? Gotta drop into GL-like drawcalls and add a coloured rectangle below your wi…

> Kivy's multiplatform support is impressive. An application I'm working on at the moment runs in X on Ubuntu, on Microsoft Windows and on a Raspberry Pi 3. On the latter Kivy draws the UI using the frame buffer directly, without X.

Isn't that the same as with most other multiplatform toolkits? GTK and Qt both support framebuffer rendering, IIRC.

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